Disorganized, disjointed, and sometimes completely lost,
but finding my way through writing.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Mom

This month my family has been
celebrating my mother’s 80th birthday. As you might expect, the
milestone has occasioned a festival of storytelling and the ritual of
reflecting on the importance of Mom in each of our lives.

The storytelling is my favorite
part. One of my sisters reminded us how Mom would insist on pulling out rows
and rows of crocheted blanket once a mistake was discovered near the beginning.
Frustrating as a child, a welcome memory now for the lessons in doing a job
right. My brother likes to tell how, when he was a teenager Mom always told him
he was not too big to go over her knee. He would laugh at her and Mom would
reach up and tap him on the side of the head. None of us has a memory of Mom
putting anyone over her knee.

Mom started telling stories too.
She told about meeting my Dad at the Rex Roller Skating Rink. And how they
broke up when Dad wanted to see if the grass was greener in another girl’s
yard. It took him about three weeks to discover it wasn’t. She told
affectionate stories about her father, even though he was so mad at her for
marrying a man against his wishes she didn’t know until the wedding march
started whether he would walk her down the aisle. I learned that the night they
moved into the brick house where I grew up there was a snow storm so my Dad had
to spend the night plowing, leaving her in a new place with four children, the
youngest of them only three months old.

At her birthday party, we left out
paper and pen for guests to write birthday wishes or memories of time spent
with my mother. My cousin thanked her for always welcoming him to her house,
providing an escape from his less-than-perfect living conditions.My nephew told her she was the best roommate
he ever had. I wrote the word “Mom” on my paper then stopped. I could not find
words to express the value of having her as my mother. I could not find the one
memory that summed up her importance in my life.

I have memories of my mother beating me at
cards, advising me about marriage, sitting by my hospital bed, laughing at the
kitchen table with her brother, holding my father’s hand, dancing with her
great-grandchild, telling me my Nana had died, yelling at me to pick up my
shoes, bragging about her grandson in the Navy, working on a sewing pattern
strewn across the kitchen table, beaming when I named my daughter for her. Lessons
can be attached to every memory; the morals at the end of the stories are
there, if I want to parse them out. But I find that I don’t, not now anyway. I
left that paper with that one simple word, “Mom.” I think that is enough.